The inventive concepts disclosed herein relate to systems and methods for tracking ground access to aircraft by establishing communication between passive wireless tags or stickers mounted at an access of an aircraft and near field communication (NFC) enabled mobile devices, the communications being established momentarily upon entry and exit through the access, to record, for example, entry and egress of personnel, including aircraft cleaning crews, as an input for a calculation of delay metrics with regard to aircraft turnarounds.
Airlines and other commercial passenger air carriers operate according to fairly rigid operating schedules. The systems that ensure a constant flow of passengers and freight between destinations, including meeting intermediate connections according to an organized process, are at once fairly robust, and yet fairly inflexible in the ability to deal with disruptions and/or delays.
Most aspects of movement operations for a particular airline or other air carrier are precisely tracked from pushback at the departure gate through taxi and takeoff, via enroute flight tracking, and in the terminal phase evolutions of approach, landing, taxi and arrival at the arrival gate. In recent years, increasing awareness has been placed on monitoring of all aspects of ground turnaround evolutions while a particular aircraft is parked on the ramp or at the gate. It is in the best interest of the air carriers, from a business perspective, to exercise precise control over aircraft ground operations including expediting aircraft turnaround evolutions with all that those evolutions entail. Efficiencies are sought in debarking passengers, unloading luggage and cargo, fueling, cabin cleanup, resupply of cabin essentials (including onboard meals), loading luggage and cargo and ultimately embarking passengers for the next leg.
Each of the discrete evolutions of baggage and cargo handling, fueling, cabin cleanup and cabin resupply are generally undertaken by separate crews specialized to the particular tasks. The fueling, cabin cleanup and cabin resupply evolutions are most often completed by crews that are associated with, or contracted by, the air terminal rather than by any individual air carrier. Fueling and resupply operations are fairly precisely tracked. Almost every aspect of these operations can be directly measured from, for instance, monitoring a status and location of the fuel trucks, the catering trucks and the like via some manner of data link or other discrete communication interface. From the direct measurement of those operations, a broad description of progress of the turnaround may be obtained.
According to certain air carriers, the one metric associated with an aircraft turnaround that they remain unable to measure “directly” is the progress of the cleaning crew in preparing the aircraft cabin between flight legs. Put another way, the time that a cleaning crew spends picking up newspapers, picking up trash, and the like, and simply getting on and off the aircraft is “invisible” to any currently-fielded automated monitoring schemes.